A kind of random purchase I made a few months ago just arrived. It’s a Helium Hotspot that connects IoT devices to the internet. It’s used by (among others) Lime bikes and scooters that are popping up in various cities around the world. Helium has created something called LongFi, which I think is just LoRaWAN with metering layered on and maybe some cleaner device fleet management mechanics.
But what’s more interesting is that people like you and me are incentivized to buy one of these things and plug it in at our home by getting paid to build out and maintain network coverage and (soon) by transferring data between IoT devices and the internet.
As a proponent of distributed structures like this and a fan of using IoT devices for helpful (not privacy degrading) purposes, I’m excited to see where this project goes and to be a small part of it.